Mr Turner

Starring: Timothy Spall, Dorothy Atkinson, Marion Bailey, Lesley Manville, Paul Jesson
Directed by Mike Leigh
Rating: ***

Though most of us may not know much about the life and works of the legendary British artist J.M.W. Turner to get enthusiastic about Mike Leigh’s Mr Turner, the film shows how the life of an iconoclast can be portrayed on screen compellingly—with a majestic sweep, in all its details and vividness, with the highs and the lows, the glories and the agonies, the humaneness, flaws and warts of the subject.

Mr Turner looks at the last few years of Turner’s life and gives us a brilliant character study of the painter, best known for his landscapes. Turner is an oddball, a painter who got himself tied to a ship's mast so he could get a sea storm right on canvas. Or visits a brothel only to have a girl pose for sketching. Of course, it all comes alive magically because Leigh has an actor like Timothy Spall, who conveys eccentricity with a tart, sour look and attendant groans and grunts. But Spall can equally break into “a song of lost love”, awkward and rather unmusical, when someone plays the piano his way. It’s about his art, his understanding of colours and light, the method in his madness. Spall gets it pitch perfect.

It’s also about Turner’s relationships: a mother he is unable to forgive for “making their lives a living hell”, a father who has brought him up, assisted him in his work and whose death he finds hard to cope with. Leigh conveys a lot with little vignettes instead of dwelling on any one feeling for long. There’s houseke­eper Hannah Danby, beholden to him, painfully submissive, while he doesn’t seem to care save when he desires her. There’s her aunt and his one-time lover Sarah Danby, who keeps appearing out of nowhere like a blip or interruption, nagging about the daughters he doesn’t seem to care about. And, most importantly, there is Sophia Booth, the landlady of his seaside home, who offers companionship, comfort and warmth and brings the artist in him alive after his father’s death.

Here love is not bet­ween two impossibly beautiful people, the kisses are clumsily real and love itself is prosaic, often exploitative and shorn of romance. Yet you come out feeling the depth of the passion two women, Hannah and Sophia, felt for a man even though it’s hard to put a finger on what made them love him so.

Leigh goes beyond the Victorian props—those carriages and lampposts, the hats and the costumes—to show us the aristocracy and the royalty, the patrons and the critics and fellow artist of the times. It’s about how a royal snub can turn the tide against a talented artist, turn him from an object of admiration to an object or ridicule. It’s sprawling, it’s demanding, it’s rewarding—rather like reading a classic.